Introduction to Module 2

Hello everyone, and welcome to Module Two. In the first module, we've seen how the
universe is really, really large and the Earth is only a tiny little spec inside it.

In this module, what we're going to try to get a sense for is we're going to imagine that
the stars are all the same distance away from the earth. So the earth exists as a ball inside
a sphere, which we call the Celestial Sphere.

And you can make a map of the sky by working out celestial coordinates just in the same
way that you can make a map of the Earth by using the coordinates of latitude and
longitude.

So in this module, we'll introduce the coordinate system of the sky, we'll introduce how
the sky behaves as the Earth spins underneath the celestial sphere, and we'll break the sky
up into three separate parts.

We'll break it up into a circumpolar sky. Those are the constellations that never appear to
set from the earth. And then we'll see how there's a second portion of the sky where you
have seasonal constellations. So different stars appearing in the wintertime and different
constellations appearing in the summertime.

And then we'll look at a part of the sky that you can never ever see. It's a completely
blocked out part of the sky because the earth is always blocking our views. So we can
divide the sky up into three separate parts.

And then we'll try to get a sense for how we can navigate around the sky. And we'll start
off with the most important star in the heavens. That star is called the Pole Star. It's
proper name is Polaris. And from the perspective of anybody in the northern hemisphere,
that star doesn't appear to move. And that will be our starting point for our exploration of
the nighttime sky.

Welcome to module two.